Samhain                                                   Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

If you haven’t read the satirical piece about Canadian immigration posted below, it’s worth a look.  I want to tell you here about a true story concerning Canadian immigration, but it comes from an earlier time.

One cold day in 1968 David McCain and I set out from Muncie, Indiana Toronto bound.  Being the 1960’s we were in a drafty Volkswagen Beetle, cranky in the cold and not much help on snow covered road.  Our destination was the Toronto Anti-Draft League which distributed pamphlets outlining how to achieve landed immigrancy status in Canada.  When sent through the mail, these pamphlets were routinely seized, so David and I decided to go after them ourselves.

We drove the distance from Muncie to Detroit in one go and headed for the Bluewater Bridge, the entry point at Sarnia, Ontario.  We both had long hair and, in our orange Beetle, no doubt looked like exactly what we were.  The Canadians turned us away.  Regroup.  We went into a shopping mall, bought white shirts and winter caps, put them on, stuffing our hair up under the caps and tried again in a different lane.  Success!

After some hours we made Toronto, found the Anti-Draft League and picked up the pamphlets.  While there we noticed a store selling Asian presents, so we bought some Hell Notes and some other cheap touristy kind of things.

We had a night in Toronto and somehow found our way to the a performance called Succession*, or Three Games of Chess.  This unusual event featured Marchel Duchamp and John Cage playing three games of chess on stage, the chess board wired for sound.  In addition one of those ducks that dips its beak in a water glass, then comes up, goes down and dips again, stood on a card table nearby similarly wired.  The other performer was a man sitting on a metal folding chair reading the the classified ads from that days New York Time.  Out loud.  Into a microphone.  The audience was free to come up on stage and watch these two giants of early twentieth century avante garde art.

We were among a small audience and we stayed well into the early morning, leaving before the three games ended.  It was only much later in life that I learned this was a signal moment in Cage’s career, an event for the ages.  I was just there accidentally.

Both Dave and I had developed colds on the way up and stopped in a Canadian pharmacy for cold medicine before we began our drive back to the States.

At the border we were stopped, marched into the station and given a strip search.  Free.  No charge.  When we put our clothes back on, we found items from the car on the counter in front of the customs office.  We had these items:  125 pamphlets on landed immigrancy in Canada, several items made in Red China (the gifts) and 2-2-2’s, the Canadian cold medicine which we did not know was 40% codeine.  No wonder we felt so confident crossing the border.  This all added up to a damning conclusion.

The Customs folks confiscated everything.

Fortunately, we had no drugs in the car.  The hood and engine compartments were open, with stuff strewn on the ground and the hubcaps were off.    The reasons for our trip were gone, never to come back.  Except our memories.

*Actually, Cage hadn’t lost every single match with Duchamp. There was one that he definitely won, after a fashion. It happened in Toronto, in 1968. Cage had invited Duchamp and Teeny to be with him on the stage. All they had to do was play chess as usual, but the chessboard was wired and each move activated or cut off the sound coming live from several musicians (David Tudor was one of them). They played until the room emptied. Without a word said, Cage had managed to turn the chess game (Duchamp’s ostensive refusal to work) into a working performance. And the performance was a musical piece. In pataphysical terms, Cage had provided an imaginary solution to a nonexistent problem: whether life was superior to art. Playing chess that night extended life into art – or vice versa. All it took was plugging in their brains to a set of instruments, converting nerve signals into sounds. Eyes became ears, moves music. Reunion was the name of the piece. It happened to be their endgame.